LONDON, March 20 (JTA) -- Emerging from
the Royal Courts of Justice here on the evening of March 15
was like leaving a musty 17th-century ecclesiastical battle
for the fresh air of the 21st century.

The proposition presented to the court by Holocaust
revisionist David Irving in his libel suit against
the American Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt
throughout two months of often mind-numbing esoterica might
just as easily have been that the world is flat.

Was Auschwitz
really a death camp where Jews were systematically
slaughtered en masse? Did the Holocaust really happen? Did
Hitler order, still less know about, the destruction
of European Jewry? No, no, no, thundered Irving.

Given the wealth of historical
documentation, physical evidence and eyewitness
testimonies, including those of former death camp
commandants, the questions might have been redundant to
most reasonable people. But not, apparently, to
Irving.

To Irving, Auschwitz was an awful slave labor camp where
most of the 100,000 Jewish inmates -- his figure -- died of
natural causes. To Irving, the Holocaust was the sum total
of all the casualties of World War II. To Irving, Hitler was
the best friend the Jews had in the Third Reich.

So who was to blame for the suffering of the Jews? Why,
says Irving, the Jews themselves who, by their unspeakable
behavior and insatiable greed, have invited the hatred
and persecution of their hosts wherever they have lived over
the past 3,000 years. By Irving's logic, the victims become
the perpetrators.

Then, again, he has a penchant for turning facts on their
head. While it was Irving who instigated the libel trial, he
used his closing address to argue that if he lost, the real
victims would be free speech and the pursuit of knowledge.
The bottom line, he contended, was that his defeat would
deny his type of historians the opportunity to question the
conventional narrative of the Holocaust.

In fact the opposite is true. If Irving loses, his
reputation might suffer -- it might equally be enhanced, at
least among his followers -- but nothing will prevent him
from continuing to propagate his crackpot views.

If he wins, however, mainstream historians will have to
think long and hard about the consequences of taking on the
flat-earth brigade that Irving represents with such
felicitous ease.

But the case that Irving brought against Emory
University's imperturbable Lipstadt was not based on her
contention that the earth is actually round; rather, that
Lipstadt and her British publisher, Penguin Books, had
accused him of deliberately ignoring the evidence that the
earth is round.

Irving claims that Lipstadt's assertion that he is a
Holocaust denier, a distorter of history, a Hitler partisan
and, in the words of defense lawyer Richard Rampton,
"a right-wing extremist, a racist and, in particular, a
rabid anti-Semite" ruined his reputation and wrecked his
career.

Could Irving succeed in his libel action? And what would
that mean?

A senior source deep inside the Lipstadt defense team was
euphoric immediately after the closing statements last week.
There was no doubt, he said, that the judgment -- expected
in about three weeks -- would be in Lipstadt's favor.

Then, again, Irving was equally confident: "That's a
stupid question," he replied tersely when I asked him
whether he thought he would win.

British libel law is stacked in Irving's favor. The judge
is not being asked to rule on whether the Holocaust
happened, whether Hitler knew or approved of the
extermination of Jews or whether Auschwitz was indeed the
scene of systematic mass killing.

Instead, he must decide whether, as Lipstadt charged in
her book, Irving deliberately distorted, misstated,
misquoted and falsified historical evidence and manipulated
historical documents in order to make them conform to his
own ideological agenda. And he must decide whether Irving
deliberately ignored evidence in order to exonerate Hitler
for the persecution of the Jews.

The burden of proof fell on Lipstadt to show that Irving
actually had evidence to support the conventional meaning of
the Holocaust; he says he did not because it is a subject he
finds "endlessly boring." So, too, was the burden on
Lipstadt to show that Irving had evidence to link Hitler
with an order to kill Jews; Irving maintains no such
definitive document exists.

It is possible, on strictly technical grounds, that the
judge will find in Irving's favor, and the effect of such a
decision could be far-reaching.

To many who are not versed in
British libel law, a victory for Irving -- however
narrow, however technical -- will be perceived as a
vindication of Holocaust denial and a blurring of the
line between legitimate historical inquiry and partial
"research" that is designed to aid right-wing extremism
and fuel neo-Nazism.

Whatever the outcome, it would be entirely wrong to
assume that Irving is a cardboard cut-out fascist or a
raving lunatic. His public speeches might be intemperate,
but his actions are carefully calculated. He is a prolific
author, an articulate spokesman for his cause and he has a
presence -- physical and intellectual -- that commands
attention.

In other circumstances, Irving might have been a
front-line academic, a political leader or an effective
courtoom advocate. Instead, he has found a niche for himself
as the jewel in the crown of right-wing extremism, its
intellectual guiding star.

Adding to the contradictions that accompany Irving is
that he is openly contemptuous of the neo-Nazi skinheads who
proliferate at many of the 200-odd meetings he addresses
each year, a disdain that possibly has more to do with class
than ideological difference.

For two months, the standing-room-only crowd of lawyers,
journalists and public who converged on Court 73 were
treated to a guided tour of the Alice-in-Wonderland world
that Irving inhabits, where nothing is ever quite what it
seems to be.

He was at once the sycophantic schoolboy when addressing
the judge, the overbearing bully when dealing with defense
counsel and the bantering schoolyard chum when mixing it
with media. He was always the child, a point underscored by
his nostalgia for the days of his youth and his seeming
obligatory reference to his father, whether in his
curriculum vitae or in court.

Ultimately, Irving presented an image of an overindulged,
somewhat precocious Bar Mitzvah boy, thoroughly enjoying the
celebrity of the occasion, smug in his own cleverness,
scowling when he is denied an extra helping of chopped
liver.

Whether railing against the international Jewish
conspiracy that he says has hounded him for 30 years,
excoriating what he perceives to be the enemies of free
speech -- most major Jewish organizations, and JTA -- or
lamenting the stream of countries that have deported him
because they found his views too obnoxious, Irving is
clearly a child who hates having his party ruined.